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Importance of Password Strength

With the rising trend of information While keeping your password secure is just one of the many aspects of security, it is still something important that should not be overlooked. Having a secure password can help to better protect your information. Often times people will use passwords that are not as secure as they should be. Passwords like “password”, “1234”, and “qwerty” are some examples of passwords that are not secure. Passwords like that can be easily guessed and would probably require minimal effort and thought to crack. This is usually because not everyone knows what constitutes as a “strong” password, thinks that they need “strong” password to secure their information, or want a password that is easy to remember, or don’t believe that they’re information is in danger.

Most often people will make passwords that are easily remembered, such as their own middle name or something simple like “abc123”. Convenience should not take priority over security, especially when it comes to having a password. While a password might be easy to remember, it might not be the safest. Having a simple password that is easily guessed is not something that you would want as your last line of protection against anyone trying to get your information. A strong password can be long, but should also have variation within the characters. Adding uppercase letters, numbers, as well as symbols can help to make a password stronger.

People will also use weak passwords to important accounts since they don’t realize the passwords you think matter the least actually matter the most. An example of this would be someone’s email account. Not everyone realizes that their bank accounts are linked to their email accounts, meaning that financial information can be compromised simply by acquiring access to their email account.

4 thoughts on “Importance of Password Strength”

A lot of times people consider passwords a nuisance instead of a necessity. In a world where virtually everything requires a password many people, specially the ones from a previous generations, chose the easy route to make it easier to keep track. I’m not justifying weak passwords, but I understand why some people disregard it. Many times people don’t take the security risks seriously until they find themselves in the thick of a problem.

Fun fact: In small and medium size organizations with Windows servers, system admins calls are password resets 70% of the time.

I can understand how a person would try more to have a password that is easier to remember than one that is more secure since it is more convenient, but security should not be sacrificed for or come second to convenience. It’s sadly a trend for a person to only become aware of this after their information has been stolen from them once and have suffered some damage.

Other than the password strength, I don’t think people sometimes consider the physical security of their passwords either, such as having sticky notes on their desk with their passwords written on them, or having their passwords saved on their web browser.

This is very true, often times people who don’t realize just how important their passwords are will have them in places that can be found by others. It’s the awareness of this danger that people who don’t secure their passwords have that causes this.